As the most quoted English writer Shakespeare has more than his share of famous quotes. It’s tricky to say definitively which are his most popular quotes, but we’ve examined available polls published around the world and can now offer you the 50 most famous Shakespeare quotes.

Some quotes are famous for their beauty, some for their everyday truths and some for their wisdom. We often talk about the quotes as things the wise Bard is saying to us but, we should remember that some of Shakespeare’s wisest words are spoken by some of his biggest fools. For example, both ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be,’ and ‘to thine own self be true’ are from the foolish, garrulous, quite disreputable Polonius in Hamlet.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. (Twelfth Night)

Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once. (Julius Caesar)

Full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange. (The Tempest)

A man can die but once. (Henry IV, Part 2)

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child! (King Lear)

By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap to pluck bright honor from the pale-faced moon, or dive into the bottom of the deep, where fathom-line could never touch the ground, and pluck up drowned honour by the locks. (Henry IV Part 1)

If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? (The Merchant of Venice)

I am one who loved not wisely but too well. (Othello)

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes’ palaces. (The Merchant of Venice)

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. (The Tempest)

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. (Macbeth)

Just in case anyone is saving these quotations, this ver useful one is actually:-

Et tu, Brute? (‘The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. Act III scene i)

The character’s name is Brutus, but ‘Brute” is used here because, in Latin, when addressing someone by name, you’d change this -us ending to -e. Note, however, that the pronunciation is not the same as in the English word ‘brute’ – it’s more like the sound -ay, in the word ‘day’.